Covid Vaccines are not poisons or gene therapy.

Getting to know your body and those vaccines: Two points I have heard lately from people who are undecided about being vaccinated are 1. it is poison and 2. it is gene therapy.

If you have heard other points, let me know. I am happy, as a scientist, to talk about this. Anyway, here goes.

Poisons, in general do some great harm to cells, tissues, and/or organs. The ones I think of generally attack some pathway and keep natural processes from happening normally. The vaccines don’t do this.

Take a short break for some biology. Our cells have several compartments that do different things. For this, let’s talk about just 2: the nucleus, where most of our DNA is, and the cytoplasm, where lots of basic reactions happen and where mRNA is translated (indirectly used as a template to direct protein synthesis) to make a protein, which provides most of the structure and tools for cells.

DNA is a long string, made of one type of molecule, that is stable. mRNA, messenger RNA, is made using DNA as a template and is a string composed of a related but different molecule that is not nearly as stable as DNA and typically lasts only brief times, sometimes for minutes. Protein is a string made out of completely different, but cool, molecules, amino acids, and its synthesis uses mRNA to direct what amino acid…